Collections of personal artifacts “ whether they’re analog or digital “ tend to contain a lot of information that is personally revealing. Their ability to reflect the details, perceptions and experiences of everyday life is precisely why personal collections can be such rich and valuable resources for researchers. Librarians and archivists who are responsible for managing and providing access to personal collections have long had to balance the interests of access to revealing information with the interests of those whose lives are represented in the materials and may wish to control or restrict access to parts of collections.

Collecting personal digital archives presents unprecedented opportunities to support future research about current lives. Not only can institutions collect materials from a much wider set of individuals than they have in the past, but the materials themselves also can reveal many more details about the events and actors involved in their creation. Digital information is stored and disseminated at many different levels of representation – from the physical traces on a hard drive all the way up to the rendering of documents in particular applications and aggregation of content into new types of collections. Each level of representation constitutes a different type of digital traces left behind by human activities. Archivists and librarians must make a variety of decisions about how to capture, manage, preserve and provide access (or not) to the traces. These decisions are matters of professional ethics.

This panel will address issues of identifying, processing, redacting and providing/restricting access to potentially sensitive information in personal digital collections. Panelists will come at the issues from a variety of perspectives: addressing professional ethical frameworks, technological tools and approaches, and practical experiences in working with personal archives.

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